The paper is organized in three parts. The first part presents the encyclopedic curriculum tradition that is a common feature of primary education, secondary general education and teacher education in Norway. The modern encyclopaedic orientation with its focus on a broad subject based organization of curriculum knowledge, have been modified in Norway not least by protestant and populist curriculum interest groups. This have led to the inclusion of religion and practical home- and artisanbased fields of knowledge among the subjects, and to a relatively weak classification between expert knowledge and lay knowledge in the selection and organization of curriculum knowledge. Despite phases of attac, the main encyclopaedic principles of knowledge organization have survived as key caracteristica of modern schooling in Norway from the middle of 19C and onwards. The formost representative of this broad encyclopaedic knowledge orientation is the model of the generalist classteacher - 'allmennlæreren'. In this respect teacher education for basic schooling, historically as well as today, are one of the codifying core elements of the encyclopaedic orientation in norwegian education. A common interest in developing a curricilum design with less of the negative interference typical of encyclopaedic parallell organization of subjects, have been a unifying motivation behind the development work presented in part two of the paper. At the Department of Education at the University College of Oslo multi- disciplinary cooperation have been a focus for gradual development of thematic cooperation in more modest forms than the de-classification strategies typical of the project pedagogy from the seventies. The paper will give a brief presentation of the project and the matrice form of knowledge organization, combining subject based curricula and mutual responsibility for interdisciplinary focal themes. In the last part of the paper the idea of a mode 2 encyclopaedic curriculum is introduced as an attempt to mediate between educational studies focusing on knowledge and curriculum and social theory and studies of science focusing on knowledge policies and new places and forms of knowledge production in post-industrial societies.